American Politics from 2019 on

[Brian Peacock]

You see Jim, when a man and a dog love each other very much they sometimes go to a nice quiet place and have special cuddles.

[JimC]

Woof!

[Tero]

Our senior politcs group here:
... by Anne Applebaum with the title "MAGA Is Making the World Safe for Corruption." It's a long piece and I can only include key points.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/20 ... cy/688352/

"This world is fast disappearing. Instead, following the president’s lead, different people inside and outside the administration are seizing the revolutionary moment in order to win zero-sum victories. Countries that hang back from this free-for-all know they will suffer. “If we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said at Davos earlier this year. He was right."

Applebaum then goes into long detail of contacts between Trump administration officials and separatists in the Canadian province of Alberta.

“Alberta is in the middle of Canada. If the province were to detach itself, eastern Canada could be physically cut off from western Canada, the country would lose a substantial portion of its oil and natural-gas production, and the province’s important contributions to the national budget would vanish. Canada might cease to be a viable country, especially if other provinces started to question the union. That may be the point: In 1990, Pat Buchanan, the intellectual grandfather of the MAGA movement, declared that if Quebec ever broke off from Canada, America should “pick up the pieces.” This now seems to be, if not the publicly stated U.S. policy toward Canada, then at least the predator clan’s policy: pressure the economy, break up the federation, pick up the pieces. And no, it is not a joke.”

“The idea that a dedicated group of Americans has a plan to dismantle Canada, or that businessmen with opaque links to the U.S. government might want to create political conditions for a U.S. takeover of Greenland, may surprise Americans. It shouldn’t. Every single tactic used against Brazil, Canada, or Denmark has also been deployed elsewhere—not to support democracy, not to build American prosperity, but to spread the illiberal revolution and make money for the predators who support it."

"Ending democracy promotion. All of the U.S. government institutions created over decades to promote democratic ideas and practices have now been weakened, dismantled, or rewired to promote the revolution. USAID is gone; foreign broadcasters such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty have barely survived; the State Department’s annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, once considered a nonpartisan source of information on human rights, now suggests that Germany is more oppressive than El Salvador. Slowly, the money the U.S. spends on educational and cultural programs, scholarships, and exchange-student programs—a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and soft power since the early 1960s—is being repurposed. ”

“Outside the democratic world, where kleptocracy has long been the norm, no special changes are necessary to accommodate the new American regime. Pragmatism reigns: If American-government decisions are now for sale, then many will eagerly buy them. The Qataris did not give Trump a $400 million jumbo jet merely out of friendship. The Saudi public-investment fund did not commit $2 billion to Jared Kushner’s private-equity fund simply as a gesture of goodwill. And Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama did not offer Kushner and Ivanka Trump a piece of the country’s environmentally protected coastline to build a luxury resort because he admires their design sense.”

"Most governments in the old democratic world cannot compete in this race. Europeans, Canadians, Australinas, and others can't pay off the Americans president by investing in his children's companies, because that would be illegal. Nor are they finding it easy to adjust to the new world of quasi-private diplomacy."

“For decades, we have told ourselves that our country represents democracy, freedom, and free trade. We believed we had allies, like-minded nations that shared these values. We thought we opposed dictators and kleptocrats, the leaders who steal from their own people. What happens when we realize that we no longer do?”